The Irish dance phenomenon: Celtic crossover - includes related article on Web sites

Dance Magazine, Oct, 1997 by Jann Parry, Gary Parks

Riverdance owes its origins to a seven-minute number devised to entertain the audience for the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994, when Ireland was the host country. The annual pop-song contest is transmitted live on European TV to an estimated 300 million viewers. While the judges debated how to allocate their votes, Moya Doherty, a producer for RTV, Ireland's national television station, filled the time with a dance divertissement that she had commissioned from Flatley.

The studio audience in Dublin rose to its feet at the end of the number, which celebrated Celtic myths and the River Liffey, at the heart of Ireland's capital city. The standing ovation was both a tribute to the performers and an affirmation of the Irish audience's sense of its own identity in the eyes of the watching world. That combination of national pride, Celtic nostalgia, and kinetic pleasure in dance has boosted Riverdance--the show, the videos, the CDs--ever since. Although the Irish diaspora around the world accounts for the core of Riverdance's success, its appeal is far wider, just as a delight in flamenco is not limited to Spaniards. Audiences of all stripes seem drawn to the production.

The dancers from whom Flatley and Doherty drew inspiration for the initial Riverdance show were amateurs, veterans of the competition circuit. Colin Dunne's experience was typical. He was born twenty-nine years ago in Birmingham, England, of Irish parents (just as Flatley was born thirty-nine years ago in Chicago of Irish stock). He was sent to Irish dance class to keep him in touch with his roots, and was good enough to qualify for his first championship at the age of eight (the minimum age has since been raised to eleven). His teacher, Marion Turtey in Coventry, was, he says, "the best, and ahead of her time. She choreographed a number for us in 1985 to some fusion music--it was the Beatles' 'Hey Jude' set to a hornpipe rhythm--to express second- and third-generation Irish kids' identity confusion growing up in England. There were letters to the local press criticizing us for bastardizing traditional dance and for wearing teenage street clothes instead of proper outfits."

Competition rules were, and are, extremely strict. "Boys had to wear kilts, which I hated," says Dunne. "We rehearsed for hours every day, preparing three routines, one in soft shoes and the others in hard shoes, girls as well as boys. You go through the grading system run by the Commission [An Coimisiun le Rinci Gaelacha, the Irish Dance Commission] until you reach the championships--All-Ireland, Great Britain, and World. I won twenty-nine titles in all until I retired at twenty-two to become an accountant. There was no way then of earning your living as a dancer."

Dunne has been pondering, for a book he is writing, why he danced as a youth. "It was always for competition," he muses, "not for fun or social pleasure, though I do remember going into the studio when I wasn't in training and putting on any music I liked--pop, jazz, anything--and just moving to the music, wearing my sneakers instead of dance shoes. I'd use the steps I made up, and the accidents, to spark off ideas for a competition dance." He says that the rules changed to allow for innovations. "Tap syncopations came into the heavy-shoe routines, which also grew faster and more complicated, and ballet influenced the soft-shoe work. I'm not sure that Michael [Flatley] realized how much things had moved after he did his last world championship in 1975. He wasn't unique as an innovator."